Category Archives: Food - Page 17

Rice Noodle Lasagna

Posted by on December 19, 2010 31 comments

Probably everyone knows how to make lasagna, but as it’s one of our favorite foods we thought we’d post a recipe. Lasagna makes a healthy meal if it’s made with rice, not wheat, noodles.

The key to great lasagna is the sauce. Today we started with 80% ground beef and let the fat from the beef act as our oil.

Once it’s brown we add onions,

Shiitake mushrooms:

Spinach and sauce:

The finished sauce looks like this:

We get a long, flat pre-cooked rice noodle that looks like this:

But any rice noodle will do, it doesn’t need to make a solid layer. Asian groceries will have several varieties of rice noodle.

In a ceramic casserole dish, put a layer of sauce in the bottom, then a layer of noodles:

Add ricotta and mozzarella cheese on top of the noodles, and then start again with sauce:

When it’s ready, bake it for 40 minutes or so at 325 degrees Fahrenheit. We lost track of time and overcooked it a bit, it came out looking like this:

It still tasted great!

Cambridge Fried Rice

Posted by on December 12, 2010 57 comments

CarbSane has asked for a recipe for Yang Zhou Fried Rice; Yang Zhou is a city in southern China in a leading rice-farming region.

As far as we know there is no special ingredient, though Wikipedia says that barbecued pork is a characteristic ingredient. The great thing about fried rice is that you can adjust the ingredients to your taste; use as many or as few as you like. So, here is our recipe — let’s call it Cambridge Fried Rice.

The key steps are to “fry” (really, warm and coat in oil) the ingredients separately, to get a good diffusion of oil throughout the rice and food.

Here’s how it’s done. As always, click on images to enlarge.

First, gather ingredients. You’ll need oils, eggs, long-grain rice (short-grain rice sticks together and doesn’t work as well), plus other ingredients of your choice.  Here are peas, carrots, scallions, and shrimp — we’ll also use mushrooms:

Friedrice1b

Next, scramble some eggs. Use whatever oil you like, we think eggs go well with butter:

Set the scrambled eggs aside, add new oil to the pan (now we’ll use olive oil), and add any of the miscellaneous ingredients that need cooking:

Again, set these ingredients aside:

The long-grain rice should have been cooked, but long enough ago that it has had time to cool and dry. Traditionally, fried rice uses leftover rice — cooked earlier in the day or the previous day.

Add oil (now we’ll use coconut oil) and rice to the pan, stir until rice has soaked up the oil and is uniformly coated:

Now return all the ingredients to the pan, mix, and add spices to taste:

In this case we added salt and pepper, divided the fried rice in two, and added turmeric to one half. (Soy sauce can be added to hot oil when frying vegetables and meat, but it’s not necessary.)

Serve:

We haven’t measured weights or counted calories, but it’s fairly obvious that this is a fat-rich (oils, egg yolks), carb-moderate (rice), protein-light (shrimp, egg whites) recipe with vegetables for good measure — essentially, the Perfect Health Diet macronutrient ratios.

This is the basic recipe, add spices or ingredients to your taste!

If you would like another view of Yang Zhou Fried Rice, from a professional chef, here’s a video:

Neo-Agutak: “Eskimo Ice Cream”

Posted by on December 5, 2010 77 comments

UPDATE: Melissa has given this dish a great name: “Neo-Agutak,” after the Inuit dish Agutak or “Eskimo ice cream.”

Eating certain foods during a fast can increase its health benefits.

In the book we recommend coconut oil and fiber-rich calorie-poor plant foods. Our reasoning is:

  • Short-chain fats in coconut oil make the fast more ketogenic. Ketones have benefits for immunity, neuronal function, cancer suppression, and HDL production. They also reduce glucose requirements, making the fast less stressful.
  • Fiber in plants may be digested by gut bacteria to butyrate, a beneficial short-chain fat.
  • Anti-microbial plant compounds help fight gut pathogens and biofilms, shifting the balance of power in the gut toward commensal species.

Good food choices during a fast include green leafy vegetables, which are highly nutritious; traditional herbal spices, like oregano or turmeric, which have antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity; and berries, which are rich in antimicrobial compounds.

What I Ate During Today’s Fast

Baby spinach, cranberries, and coconut oil.

First, I put a layer of baby spinach in a bowl:

Next, I add cranberries and coconut oil:

Then, I heat them in the microwave for a few minutes. After the coconut oil has melted and the spinach shrunk, I add more spinach and cranberries. You can also add spices to taste. Then, another few minutes in the microwave so that most of the cranberries burst their skins, and let it cool. It will look like this:

This bowl has about 125 carb calories from a half-pound of cranberries, about 500 fat calories from coconut oil, and a host of gut-cleaning pathogen-disabling plant compounds. It tastes great (I think), and makes a passable Christmas decoration!

I started eating this about 1 pm. I had eaten 3/4 of it by 4 pm, when I added 3 egg yolks. It was finished by 6 pm. This was my only food before dinner.

Pão de Queijo (Brazilian Cheese Puffs)

Posted by on November 21, 2010 43 comments

PAJ: This is a guest post by Mario Renato Iwakura, who comments as “Mario” and is our resident authority on hypothyroidism. At chez Jaminet we’ll be placing an order for tapioca starch soon to give this recipe a try. Looks scrumptious!

Ingredients

400g (14 oz) regular or sour tapioca/manioc/cassava flour/starch

200g (7 oz) grated parmesan cheese

200ml (6.7 fluid oz) milk

2 eggs

2 tablespoons butter (30g/1oz)

1 teaspoon sea salt

Recipe

1. Put the tapioca flour in a bowl.

2. Heat the milk, butter and salt together to just shy of boiling (90ºC, 194ºF).

3. Slowly blend the milk-butter-salt into the tapioca flour stirring constantly until thoroughly mixed.

4. Let the batter cool and then add the eggs.

5. Knead until smooth.

6. Add the cheese and knead again until smooth.


7. Form into balls of around 30/35g (1/1.2oz).

The recipe will make around 30 balls.

8. Bake in a pre-heated woven (200ºC/400ºF) unti golden brown (around 20min if not frozen).

9. Enjoy while hot!

Some tips, information:

a. The original recipe calls for “Queijo Minas Curado” (ripened Minas cheese), Minas Gerais is a Brazilian state.
b. If you think that parmesan is too strong, you can use a mix of parmesan with another cheese.
c. You can add little pieces of gorgonzola, bacon, garlic or parsley to the balls.
d. Sour tapioca flour makes a tastier cheese puff.
e. Tapioca/manioc/cassava flour or starch is all the same thing.
f. The balls can be frozen.